Category Archives: tablet/ipad

Salaam alaikum sisters, and before I go on, let me apologize for the long hiatus. I have been around, but have been soo busy with my own appointments and appointments for my daughter, driving my son across the city every day for private school alhamdulillah, and getting ready for the new baby that I havent had time to just sit and write subhanAllah. Anyway, a wonderful sister I know, Tahera, who teaches a few of us Qu’ran, sent a link with an article by Mamoon Yusaf about five ways of which to improve your fluency when reciting Qu’ran. It is not too heavy of an article, but I will sum it up here for here for you…

1) Follow the first advice given to the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) “Recite!”. Recite as much as you can, as frequently as you can. Nothing can replace this discipline. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Before you know it, you’ll be reading an unfamiliar page in the same amount of time it used to take you to read a couple of lines.

2) You need to link the habit of reciting the Quran in Arabic with something you already do every single day without fail.

An excellent way to go about it is to link it with one (or more) of your 5 daily prayers. That way, you’re already in a state of wudhu, so one of the main psychological barriers is out of the way.

Now make the commitment to recite a small amount of Quran every single day for the next 30 days after the selected prayer.

3) Here is a trick that will double or triple your effectiveness and speed at reading the Quran. Let’s say you’ve decided to recite 2 pages of the Quran after Isha every night and 2 pages before you leave for work in the morning.

Instead of reciting the first 2 pages on day one morning and the next 2 pages on day one night, try this out. On day one morning, recite page 1, then recite page one again. Then on day one evening, recite page 1 again, and again.

“But then I’ll only have done one page?!” I hear you exclaiming. That’s true, but you’ll have done that page four times, and what’s more important, is that by the 4th recitation, you will read it about 3 or 4 times quicker that on your first attempt. Aim for reading the page 5 times each day.

The next day, you can move on to page 2, and so on. At the end of the week, you might like to do one marathon session of going through all 7 pages you covered that week.

You may even want to do this with a Tajweed teacher, who’ll correct your recitation. You’ll notice that you can still recite page 1 about 2 or 3 times faster and more fluently than on your 1st attempt.

600 days later you will have completed the Quran 6 times.

If you recite the page 5 times each day, and once at the end of the week, it’s the equivalent of completing the Quran once every 100 days – just over 3 months. That’s like reading the Quran 4 times a year – but who’s keeping count? 😉

4) The key to the whole process of understanding the Quran is to learn Quranic vocabulary lists. If you learn around 300 words, that accounts for about 70% of the entire Quran.

5) Finally,

If you are still struggling, the iPod technique will propel you forward. Get an online recitation from a famous reciter, whose voice you love. Listen to the recitation, one page at a time, as you read along the script with your finger.

Even if the reciter goes way too fast for you to start with, just finger along the page. Then, rewind back to where the page started, and do it again, and again. Because the reciter goes much faster than you, you can go over the same page several times in one sitting. Eventually, you will be able to follow with your eyes, and then your lips and tongue.

Salaam alaikum sisters,
The title sounds like a fairy tale story doesn’t it? To explain further, my daughter loves the ipad. She always uses her Baba’s ipad from work and now a brother and close friend of my husband is sending her his ipad to have. This is exciting not only because she loves touch screens and games but because we can now use the ipad for something more.. an aac (augmentive and alternative communication) device. We purchase and download the Speak for Yourself app for $299 and it turns the tablet into a $7000 aac device. Sounds too good to be true? It may just be. Apparently Pentke, the major producer of these aac devices my daughter needs, is now suing the makers of the aac App. Now I am no longer sure if we will be able to get it for her… I can understand their concern – the cost of the app and a tablet is a whole lot cheaper than their own $7000 device but when patent litigation has the potential to affect the vulnerable, the debate is no longer a laughing matter. It would be so easy for their company to make an app like this, although with each download, they will be making hundreds compared to thousands… the only issue I have is that when another mother contacted them, they gave a negative response to the question of whether making an app was in the future plans. Shouldn’t my daughter be able to tell me she wants to go to ballet class, or with her father to the mosque, or that the dress her khalah in Yemen made her for Eid with the crystals on it is her favorite? She has so much to say, so much, I know she does, and it hurts me so bad that she cannot express her wants and needs, her likes and dislikes. InshaAllah things go as we hope, and she gets to use this program.